TODAY: In 1902, Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, is born.
- A very bad year filled with very good writing: Here are our favorite Lit Hub stories of the year. | Lit Hub
- 40 bookstores in 40 weeks: J. David Gonzalez on the habit-forming pastime of buying books. | Lit Hub
- “No writer has better mined the depths and variety of human experience and emotion.” You could certainly do worse than being stuck with Shakespeare during a plague. | Lit Hub
- Want a little Kropotkin in your YA? (Yes please.) | Lit Hub
- “They represented an ‘alternative Bloomsbury’ with their own magazines and friendships.” On the literary friendship of Rose Macaulay and Critic Naomi Royde-Smith. | Lit Hub
- “The question arises: are we just a series of chemical reactions?” Etel Adnan considers life’s bigger mysteries as the California wildfires rage. | Lit Hub
- What the hell happened in the 80s? On the rise of literary theory in American academia. | Lit Hub
- Want to feel hungry? Read Bryan Washington on his year in takeout orders. | The New Yorker
- “In the end, Chang’s trauma, and the trauma he inflicted on other people, becomes part of his public persona, while we simply carry ours.” Hannah Selinger on what—and who—David Chang’s memoir leaves out. | Eater
- Publishers’ policies around e-books are “bolting an adamantine layer of technology onto the world’s classrooms, in what amounts to a stealth form of privatization.” | The New Republic
- What’s the key to reviving a dead language? | JSTOR Daily
- J.K. Rowling’s vocal transphobia, a betrayal to so many of her fans, is also “the culmination of a two-decade power struggle for ownership of her fictional world,” Molly Fischer writes. | Vulture
